Computers are utilized pervasively in today's society to perform a wide variety of tasks and for entertainment purposes. For instance, computers today are utilized for gaming, communications, research, and a virtually endless variety of other applications. One of the most common uses of computers, by both businesses and individuals alike, is the creation of electronic and printed documents. Computer application programs exist for creating all kinds of electronic documents, including spreadsheets, presentations, word processing documents, graphical documents such as diagrams and digital images, computer-aided design documents, and many other types of electronic documents.
Electronic documents often include content that is very important. Moreover, the content of an electronic document in many cases would be difficult or impossible to recreate if lost. For instance, highly complicated legal, business, marketing, and technical documents are often created that could not easily be recreated if the data file storing the document were corrupted or destroyed. Even in cases where the contents of a document could be easily be recreated, it can be very frustrating for a user to lose even a small portion of their data. Accordingly, it is very important that the data contained in electronic documents be protected against destruction and corruption.
Modern computer systems include error checking and other mechanisms to protect against the inadvertent destruction or corruption of data files. Unfortunately, even with these mechanisms in place, it is quite common for the data files in which electronic documents are stored to become corrupted. Corruption may occur while the data file is being saved to mass storage or may occur as a result of a faulty storage device or controller hardware. Data files may also become corrupted during network transmission or by the occurrence of many other types of events. Because the loss of any amount of data can be frustrating to a user and because the time and effort necessary to recreate a corrupted document is often very high, it is important that as much data as possible be recovered from a corrupted data file.
It is with respect to these considerations and others that the various embodiments of the present invention have been made.